The necessity of communicating with someone on a real-time basis varies as a function of the urgency of the communication. Frequently, calling parties are often content to leave a voice mail message for someone or the called parties will often let calls be redirected to voice mail if they are busy or do not want to be disturbed. Occasionally, calls are of an urgent nature and need to be attended to on an immediate basis.
Therefore, a need exists for a method and apparatus for providing emergency ring tones for urgent calls in a packet network, e.g., a VoIP network.